JAPANESE A MENACE TO AMERICAN WOMEN
FEMALE HELP IS BEING DRIVEN OUT

Unclean Practices of Orient Bringing Degradation and Debasement in the Train of Unrestricted Immigration.

Malign as has been the influence of the Japanese upon the men workers of the Pacific Coast the effect of their competition upon the women workers has been still more disastrous. Under their influence female domestic help has well nigh disappeared from our midst. Their cruel competition is thus felt by the most helpless class in the community, the women and girl wage earners. Women are not able to help themselves, or to protect themselves to the same extent as men, and they are therefore peculiarly easy victims to the Juggernaut of Asiatic advance.

Women have not the power of combination, nor of mutual helpfulness, or only to a very modified degree, and their resistance to Asiatic aggression has therefore been feeble and ineffective. The status of women is not perhaps a matter in which the average politician is keenly interested. The laurels of place and of power do not usually await the champions of women, and their protection is not a milestone upon the road to political fortune. None the less, every intelligent and disinterested reformer knows well that the status of women is the index of civilization, and that the economic system that brings distress into the ranks of women, or allows such distress unnecessarily to enter, is either itself doomed or must be the doom of the nation to which it belongs. There is no need to enlarge upon the certain moral results that must follow the displacement of women from the labor ranks of the State. Those results are as obvious as they are distressing, and they must inevitably initiate a general and rapid deterioration of communal character from which recovery must be slow and painful.

When the social history of America is written in the light of a true perspective--and that time has not yet come--the dominance of the Nation will not be ascribed to this or to that political platform, to this or to that policy, but rather to the influence of its women and to the position that they have won for themselves in national guidance and direction. Every nation in the world is to-day spelling out its fate and fortune by the extent of the honor in which it holds its women. The women of America may yet constitute an unconquerable force in the national advance and whatever tends to their degradation, to an enhancement of the difficulties that beset them, is as an ax laid to the roots of American life. The Japanese in the cities are even more the competitors of women that they are of men, and, although this particular aspect of the danger may be largely inconspicuous and voiceless, it is none the less real, none the less threatening.

UNCLEAN INFLUENCES.

Of the status of women in Japan we have, of course, nothing to say. This is a matter for their own domestic regulation, and we can only hope that they will give to it their heedful attention, and that speedily. We have, however, a strenuous objection to see that status introduced visibly into American life, and the columns of the daily newspapers show the extent to which this is being done. Within the past few weeks, for example, we have read of marriages by photograph and of the arrival upon this Coast of women who have been so married. To speak of such a ceremony as a marriage at all is, of course, a concession to les convenances. It would ordinarily be expressed in a manner less polite and more forcible. That such proceedings should be openly attempted upon Californian soil shows the assurance that has been bred from immunity and the unclean influences that have been allowed to creep into our midst.

That is, of course, but a beginning, and its extension may well be a matter for some apprehension. There is another Japanese custom which immemorial age has exalted to the height of religion, and to which they will certainly cling for many years to come, even if it is not altogether ineradicable. We refer to the right of parents to sell their daughters for shameful purposes and the filial obligation of the daughters to submit. Perhaps this will be the next importation from Asia, if, indeed, it has not already made its appearance. These things are indications of the status of Japanese women of the lower classes, and we are not, therefore, surprised to read of the revolting, cruel and shameful punishments sometimes inflicted upon the Japanese work girls in the modern Japanese factories.

We do not wish, nor do we intend, to see the Asiatic status of women introduced into America, nor can we tolerate the practices that are born from that status.